The 13 Greatest New Yorkers of All Time

Born there, made there, or simply unimaginable anywhere else. The five boroughs have produced an unreasonable number of them.

1

Theodore Roosevelt

Born on East 20th Street, he ran the city's police department before he ran the country.

2

Alexander Hamilton

The immigrant lawyer who built the American financial system from lower Manhattan and is buried at Trinity Church.

3

Jay-Z

The Marcy Houses rapper who turned a Brooklyn childhood into a catalogue and a business empire.

4

Stan Lee

The Manhattan-born writer and editor who co-created most of the Marvel universe from a midtown office.

5

Jane Jacobs

The Greenwich Village writer whose fight against expressways changed how cities everywhere are planned.

6

Martin Scorsese

The Little Italy director who spent a career filming the city's streets from the inside.

7

Fiorello La Guardia

The Depression-era mayor who rebuilt the city's infrastructure and read the funny papers on the radio during a strike.

8

Andy Warhol

The Factory artist who made New York the centre of the postwar art market.

9

Walt Whitman

The Brooklyn newspaperman whose Leaves of Grass gave the city and the country a voice.

10

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The Brooklyn-born justice who argued her way through sex-discrimination law before joining the Supreme Court.

11

Duke Ellington

The bandleader whose Cotton Club residency and Harlem years defined the city's jazz age.

12

Robert Moses

The master builder who gave the city its parkways and beaches and bulldozed neighbourhoods to do it.

13

Jean-Michel Basquiat

The Brooklyn painter who went from tagging SAMO on downtown walls to the centre of the 1980s art world.